This excellent action comedy delivers a high quality script, excellent interaction between Mr and Mrs Smith themselves and some memerable moments putting it well above the rest of the pack.
Category Archives: Cinema
Van Helsing
A lightweight vampire/monster action comedy with few surprises that is let down by the premise at the end and redeemed only by Hugh, Beckensale and the superb David Wenham.
Max Payne
Sing a lament for what might have been, for what could have been; Max Payne is good looking but the screenplay lacks consistency and integrity.
Max Payne
Oh Max, what have you done?
Warning: Review probably contains spoilers and definitely contains foul language.
I don’t want to crucify this film because I don’t think it deserves it. However, as you can imagine as the start of a review, that sentence can’t bode well. I wanted to see this in the cinema because I think action / thrillers deserve a shot on the big screen. I think that was the right choice, but I also think we might have enjoyed Zack and Miri make a Porno more.
Max Payne (for the 2% of the people in the world who might ever read this blog and don’t know) is based on a computer game of the same name. The gimmick, if you like, in the game is the ability to slow-down the action so you can aim or react more accurately. The main character in the game (it’s a 3rd person shooter) is Max Payne, a cop whose wife and child are murdered. The movie has a similar premise and while the general elements of the game are the same, the overall plot structure is different.
Ok that’s enough background. So, what’s wrong with it? Well, the pace is wrong. It’s too slow for an action movie, but not tense or suspenseful enough to be a thriller. The pace doesn’t flow either, it jerks around like a lame fish and that doesn’t help the overall image. I have a feeling this is mainly an issue with how the final movie was edited, but I could be wrong, it could be the screenplay. On top of that, Max is plain dumb. He’s stupid. He behaves like a stupid dumb fuck. He’s miserable, he’s an idiot. When he finally gets the evidence he needs to prove he’s innocent and begin the search for what really happened he doesn’t even send it to the police, FBI or internal affairs before running off to exact his revenge.
His dumb fuckedness and miserableness mean it’s almost impossible to empathise with him. Fuck, he got shot and even I thought ‘good, maybe he’ll die and we’ll be put out of his misery’. Yeh I get that his wife and kid were taken from him, and I get that he’s brooding, but fucking get over it man really. Mark Wahlberg does fine with the material, assuming that’s how it was written, but you can’t like the character, there’s just nothing to like.
The screenplay – well. The story is contrived, yeh I know it’s based on a game, but come on, some of this shit is basic stuff. Here’s a few:
- there’s an internal affairs guy, whose sole reason for existing appears to be to ensure in the last few moments of the movie he can go ‘don’t shoot Max, make sure we bring him in alive’, in case you know, the thousands of armed police involved decide to put him down. He adds zero value (other than a minor role allowing us to learn who the real bad guy is).
- near the end, the FBI get called in but don’t do anything other than galvanise everyone else into stupid and pointless fucking gun-toting action. WTF.
- the mid-level bad guy sweats, a lot. Come on, I’ve seen CSI, his sweat is all over every crime scene he’s in, they would have nailed him months ago.
- Max is ‘framed’ for a death (of a cop), but at the same time he’s almost beaten to a pulp, except the only injury he appears to sustain is a sore hand which goes away in the next few scenes. Based on that, somehow the entire police force thinks Max did it. Despite that, he’s allowed to walk around with his gun and the police just stare at him in a menacing manner. And a useless IA guy asks him some questions (two to be exact). The whole thing is a contrivance to somehow make us feel Max is being set up or prevented from doing something. However since we have no empathy for whiny-fucktard Payne, we don’t care.
- Max Payne, super-cop, misses that his wife’s work has been taken from her desk the night a robbery goes down, and only notices 3 years later. Come on!
I could rant like that for a lot longer but I’ll stop. Suffice to say, the screenplay is contrived, we’re forced to make too many assumptions, believe too much bullshit and accept too much stupidity from our hero to make it work. It’s possible some of this was explained in cut scenes and it’s been butchered or it’s possible it was never in the screenplay and the director made the best he could.
Did I say yet that Max Payne (the character) is fucking stupid? Not unlucky. Not in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just dumb. And he shoots a lot of people without asking questions, after he’s invaded their place, yeh sure most of them are bad guys, but moping unhappy revenge driven cops who shoot first are hard to empathise with.
Not only is the screenplay contrived, it’s just not very good. The dialog is cliched, there are sections of exposition to explain stuff we already got (we’re not as fucking stupid as Payne is) and then there are things which just don’t get explained that make little sense. Again, could be an editing issue (too much on the cutting room floor) or the original screenplay’s problem. It looks to me like the director has more experience than the two writers though, so I’m going to hedge a bet and say the screenplay sucked.
So why am I so angry? I mean, the screenplay for Doom was pretty stupid but I coped okay with that (mostly). I’m angry because this movie was three feet away from being really good. Not Oscar material, but certainly a top quality Action Thriller with some nice quotes and some good memories.
The visuals were great, really. I loved the look of the movie, it captured the bleak, harsh world and the contrast between that and the burning hallucinations of the drug addicts were superb. The hallucination scenes were beautifully rendered and the little falling flaming mote motif ((yeh I did that on purpose)) was really nice. The action scenes were pretty good, although there weren’t enough and they were too short (but that might have been an issue with getting the American PG-13 rating). The acting is pretty good, considering the movie genre, original source material and the shoddy screenplay. Despite the crud that Mark Wahlberg had to spout, he did a good job of it. He looked the part, credible. The supporting cast was good enough. The soundtrack was solid but nothing special.
But it fell short. Either the good screenplay was ruined by bad direction, or a terrible screenplay was directed as well as possible. Whichever it was, Max Payne is a movie that could have finally brought us a credible computer game conversion, but didn’t.
Fuck you Max Payne, and your miserable bloody existence.
Quantum of Solace
Quantum of Solace is better than Casino Royale, picks the story up just after Casino finishes and runs with it at an incredible pace until finally bringing it to a satisfying end.
Quantum of Solace
I liked Casino Royale although I thought structurally it had issues. I thought the new look for the Bond franchise was beyond necessary, it needed to step away from the cliche and it did that very successfully. As a result, I was looking forward to QoS and I was a little concerned when I read a couple of negative reviews. The first said that it crams too much action into a short space without time to breath and the second that there’s so much double crossing going on you have no idea where anyone stands.
Well let me tell you, if you’re a fan of action movies, spy based action movies, Bond, or just thrilling cinema, then you’ll probably enjoy Quantum. It’s not perfect, but it gets the pace much better than Royale did, and it’s no-where near as complex. A big issue I had with Royale was the need for so much exposition at the end to explain what had happened. Quantum avoids that, it’s more contained and you’re left to draw your own conclusions about anything they don’t simply tell you which is a much more mature approach.
Quantum picks up immediately where Royale left off and the British Secret Service begins the journey of understanding the new organisation they have discovered. There are surprises and twists at pretty much every stage although they’re not overwhelming. The action does kick off right from the outset and the pace is solid, but there are moments to reflect and catch your breath. Craig is superb as Bond once again, and the two main female characters are well played. I won’t spoil the female leads, but will just say that they both bring something completely different to the story.
I had some minor quibbles with the plot (which I won’t spoil) but they’re truly small issues. I liked the ‘bond-light’ approach, there’s no discussion of gadgets and the one or two used are really small elements, there’s no huge organisation supporting Bond where-ever he goes. For a lot of the movie he’s on his own, for the usual reasons (he’s rebelling, it’s in his nature).
The only real complaint I have about the content apart from the minor plot issues, is that the bad guy packs no punch. Ok, so the organisation he’s in is huge and scary and in control of the entire universe, but the guy himself just poses no threat in my mind’s eye. He needed a steel rimmed hat or something, maybe steel teeth.
I do have another complaint about the direction for the action sequences, and that is that I didn’t enjoy the style. The chase sequences are made up of super-fast cuts, super-shaky shots and usually cut against a backdrop of some other activity (horse race, opera). It’s just a little too quick for me, I would have preferred more tight-camera work and steadier, longer shots. It does however give you a huge sense of danger and pace, it’s just not my style.
Even with those last two issues, Quantum of Solace was an excellent movie experience, and as I said, if you’re a fan of the genre or Bond you’ll probably enjoy this a great deal. For people who’ve never seen either, it’s a pretty good introduction (although without seeing Royale it won’t make as much sense).
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the second del Toro Hellboy film, and it assumes you’ve seen the first one. There’s no setup, hardly any introduction (there’s a little bit) and it gets straight into the action. I like that, if you wanted character intro’s for the lesser characters you had the chance to watch the first one before you went to the cinema.
HB2TGA (can’t spend the entire review writing Hellboy II: The Golden Army) is visually amazing. I believe; I believe this stuff exists somewhere and del Toro just took a camera along. The special effects make this film work, they make you truly believe. The pace is good although the overall film felt a little shorter than I would have liked. The script is snappy and isn’t going to impress your literature teacher, but if you went in to this movie expecting anything deep, you weren’t watching the same trailers as me in advance. Character interplay is solid enough, however I think the Liz Sherman character was underused. There’s a shot towards the end of the movie with her and Abe standing around looking useless while Hellboy and another character do their thing, and I wondered if it wouldn’t have been possible to use her a bit more.
Speaking of ‘another character’, there’s a new addition to the team in this outing and he’s entertaining and interesting, but I do wonder if it detracted from the original team of three a little – I always get edgy when movies have too many main players.
The action scenes are excellent overall, and we get to see Hellboy showing more than just ‘crush ’em’ type combat skills, which was nice. Despite several good goes there still wasn’t much of a sense of threat to Hellboy or the major players though; but there were some subtle references to his destiny and Liz having to make some choices that may affect it.
There are two particularly good comic sequences (more than two in the movie, but two stand out) which had most of the cinema laughing out loud.
The bad guy is multi-faceted and well played, there is certainly no caricature of evil here, but a complex individual with specific morals and the drive to obtain his desire at the expense of the human race. I had read a review or two complaining about the ‘echo-warrior’ bandwagon, which is basically complete tosh. The sentiment expressed by the Elven Prince is a long-standing theme in celtic fantasy and celtic real-world crossover fantasy in particular. The elven princess is equally well played in my view and entrancing.
I came home after seeing it, determined to write a blog post about people releasing trailers containing footage not in the final movie and how it annoys me. There was, I believed, a shot in one of the trailers I’d seen of the Prince in a room full of other elves and mythical beings calling for war and being given a good reception. It implied the Prince had a lot of backing and support, and that was missing from the film (you’ll see). So I got in, and watched all three trailers – and of course the scene isn’t there. I can see why I got that impression, and I recognised all the bits they had put together. I don’t know if they intentionally decided to give that view, when it’s not there in the film, but I guess I can’t complain about entire scenes that were missing when they never existed in the first place. It does say something interesting about how trailers and moving images can leave vivid impressions about something that never existed.
Anyway, this is a high quality movie with stunning visuals, a more than average complexity villain and some real laugh out loud moments interspersed with exciting action. If you can only go and see one movie this year, go and see The Dark Knight, but if you can see two, make this one a choice high up on the list.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Hellboy II: The Golden Army sets new standards in fantasy film special effects providing a visually rich and stunning experience allowing you to effortlessly believe in the images you see on screen and backs this up with a snappy and funny script and exciting action sequences.
The Dark Knight
My advice is, go and see The Dark Knight in the cinema. I echo Mark’s view that we should make sure good quality blockbuster movies (as opposed to low quality blockbuster movies) continue to get made because people are prepared to go and see them in the cinema. You do need to see this on the big screen to do it full justice, but it’s a solid, character driven movie with depth and quality acting that will work well in any format.
The Dark Knight is the second Nolan directed Batman movie and is without a doubt the darkest of any Batman movie to-date. This is no jolly on-screen action romp, no adrenaline fueled crazy rush of action, it’s a dramatic, well paced, solid and dark look into heroes, heroics and sacrifice. This is a modern, real Gotham city filled with modern and real people. There’s just that edge of decay that makes sure you know it’s Gotham but it could be anywhere in our current time, the story is contemporary and the people and emotions are built on a foundation of reality that makes the violence and horror of the Joker even more dreadful.
Heath is fantastic as The Joker, but he’s not a god. His performance is fantastic because the backdrop on which it plays out is also fantastic, everyone around him puts in amazing performances to make sure he doesn’t steal every scene. Bale is excellent, giving us a flawed and emotionally torn Batman without turning him into a caricature, and his counterplay with Heath is totally engaging. The story is as you would expect, a slight parallel to the first Batman movie (and probably some of the comics, although I’ve never read them), The Joker taking on the Mob, the City and Batman all together. There are no major flaws, although there are one or two places where I wonder if we missed an edit or are supposed to have to read between the lines a little.
The pace is good despite a slow start which worried me. There’s not as much direct action as I was expecting, and far more personal drama which is no bad thing. What action there is feels deadly enough and The Joker’s body count is certainly high enough to give the story an edge and a feeling of danger. All of the major characters see character development of one kind or another, and there doesn’t feel like any wasted space on screen or wasted time with any particular person. The dialog is dramatic without being melodramatic, and there are some really nice touches and emotional triggers (which I won’t spoil for you).
I was slightly dissapointed with the Bat Pod and one or two ‘moves’ felt pretty contrived (the wall flip) but it didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment, I just hope we get a new Batmobile in the next one (assuming there is going to be a next one). It’s a tiny complaint in what is otherwise a really, really enjoyable flick.
The end is simply brilliant in my view, simple, honest and deeply satisfying.
It doesn’t quite live up to the insane hype, but then what movie could; it does however deliver an excellent and entertaining 2 and a half hours of dramatic quality movie going fun.
The Dark Knight
This superb dramatic action flick and absolute darkest Batman movie to-date doesn’t live up to the impossible hype but still delivers an excellent and entertaining 2 and a half hours of dramatic quality movie going fun.